


Rip Current

by rabbit_hearted



Category: Purple Hyacinth - Ephemerys & Sophism (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M, happy halloween im about to make you all sad as fuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:53:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27316558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbit_hearted/pseuds/rabbit_hearted
Summary: They keep meeting. Meeting and meeting and meeting. He wonders where it’s supposed to stop.
Relationships: Lauren Sinclair/Kieran White
Comments: 22
Kudos: 78





	Rip Current

And then I can tell myself

What the hell I'm supposed to do

And then I can tell myself

Not to ride along with you

-Lord Huron, _The Night We Met_

* * *

The first time he sees her, he’s eleven-and-a-half years old, knobby-kneed and thin as a wisp of smoke, burgeoning with a tentative optimism they had yet to crush. On the good days, they’ll let him walk to the park, and that’s where he finds her, sitting on the swing-set. He notices that she’s not swinging, just kicking around dirt with the toe of her boot. 

He marches up and stops right in front of her. “I’m Kieran White,” he announces, somewhat proudly.

The girl looks at him, blinking. Her eyes are almost supernaturally bright, and when she fixes her full attention on him, it has the effect of disorienting him, as though he’d stared for too long into the surface of the sun. Her face is a pale teardrop and she has that plump, sulky sort of mouth he’s come to recognize in noble people. 

“So?”

Kieran blinks. Slowly, his gaze slides from her face down to the toe of her shiny boot, then back again. “Can I sit with you?” 

She shrugs, which Kieran interprets as as good a cue as any. He drops into the swing to her left and kicks up his feet until he’s swaying. The creak of the chains fill the silence, which is somehow neither companionable nor unwelcome. 

“What’s your name?” He asks. 

“Lauren,” she mutters. 

“I’m Kieran.”

“You already said that.” 

Kieran snorts, twisting his swing until the chains criss-cross. “Why are you so sad?” 

Lauren’s lips part in a breathless huff of incredulity. She tosses him a gimlet-eyed look. “What kind of question is that?” 

“I dunno. You just look sad. That’s why I came over here.” When she doesn’t answer, he barrels on, blithely unaware. “I get sad a lot, too. But I like to draw when that happens.” 

She pauses, watching him speculatively. “I’m not _sad,_ ” she sniffs. 

“Okay, then.”

Kieran resumes swinging. He ascends high enough that the toe of his sneaker scrapes the horizon line, and when he glances down again, he finds her quietly watching him. 

“Your hair is long,” she remarks. “I’ve never seen a boy with hair like yours.”

Kieran pulls his hand through his hair, which, he realizes, has grown long enough that it brushes his collar. He hadn’t noticed until she pointed it out. “They don’t cut it often.”

“Your parents?”

He shakes his head. If she expects him to elaborate further, she doesn’t let on, so they lapse back into silence. 

“I don’t have parents,” she says. Her tone is dry, as though she had said, _I don’t care for asparagus._

Kieran stills his legs so that his swing drifts to a halt beside her. “What do you mean?”

“They died,” Lauren replies factually. 

He falls quiet with contemplation. Then, after a length, he shakes his head. “No.”

She frowns, perplexed by his response. “What?”

“Well, you still _have_ parents,” Kieran says. “Just like I do. They’re just not around.” He aimlessly nudges a stone with his toe, back and forth. She watches it carve a little divot into the sand. “You didn’t come from nowhere, after all.”

She doesn’t smile, exactly, but her features sort of soften at that. “I hate it,” she mutters. 

Kieran nods sagely. “Yeah. Me too.” 

Lauren reaches into her dress pocket and withdraws a half-melted candy bar. She unwraps it from its plastic and holds it out to him in a wordless offer. 

“Here. You look hungry.” 

Kieran’s eyes lock onto the candy bar. He drags his tongue over his chapped lip and then flicks his gaze back up to her face. His eyes are so blue, she realizes. “Thanks, but I shouldn’t.” 

Lauren’s brows pull together in confusion. “Why?”

“I’m not allowed to have this stuff.”

She shrugs, pressing the candy bar into his hand. It’s warm and a little clammy, pockmarked with tiny calluses along the flesh of his palm. She wonders where they came from but innately understands that it isn’t a topic she should broach with him. “No one will find out.”

It’s all the encouragement he needs, apparently. Kieran crams the candy bar into his mouth in one bite, his cheeks bulging as he slowly chews. His eyes fall shut in quiet reverence. Lauren has never seen anyone savor food the way he does, and it makes her feel a little guilty, somehow. Tristan always has plenty of food in his home, crumbling pastries and fresh fruit and bowls of sweets. She’s never wanted for anything. 

Kieran opens his eyes to find Lauren watching him with an unreadable expression. “Thanks,” he mutters, wiping his lip with the back of his palm. 

“You’re welcome.” 

His eyes narrow on some distant point on the horizon, beyond the chain link fence at the mouth of the park. A tall, wiry man leans against a tree with his arms crossed. The hair on the back of Lauren’s neck prickles with the realization that they’re being watched. 

“I have to go,” Kieran mutters abruptly. He scrambles to his feet and scrubs at his face, erasing any lingering evidence of the candy bar. And then he whirls back towards her, his gaze blown wide, cheeks ruddied and raw. “Is it all off?”

Lauren glances at the man, then back to Kieran. Her throat feels tight as she slowly nods. 

“Thanks. Um, bye.” He twitches his fingers in a limp wave and turns to leave. 

“Wait!” 

Lauren springs off of the swing and reaches out, closing her fingers around his bony shoulder. He stiffens, still facing the front of the park. 

“Let go,” Kieran hisses, rolling his shoulder out from under her palm. The force of his startled glance cuts into her like a bolt of lightning. “It isn’t safe.” He breaks into a slow trot away from her, not chancing a glance back in her direction. She watches as he falls into step with the man and then disappears down a corner and into the bustling foot traffic.

She stays there long after he’s gone, her fist still closed around the candy bar wrapper. 

* * *

  
  
They meet again several days after his sixteenth birthday.

He sees her and his vision narrows to telescopic focus. She’s walking arm-in-arm with a boy with blonde hair and they’re laughing about something or other, but her solemn eyes are exactly the same as he remembers of the girl with the yellow sundress and the half-melted candy bar. 

Her gaze snaps up to collide with his as he turns to retreat back the way he’d come. She appraises him wordlessly through the crowd, her features furrowed with slow recognition. An array of expressions pass over her face like clouds, each transparently clear and strikingly beautiful. 

She drops her arm and turns to the boy, mouthing something he can’t place. And then she turns back to Kieran and begins weaving through the crowd toward him, her eyes locked unwaveringly on his. 

Kieran curses, turning sharply on his heel to cut across a narrow side street. He breaks into a sprint, sucking in lungfuls of air in short, feverish bursts, darting erratic paths down alleyways, past the brine-smelling loading docks, the old cathedral. When he’s certain he’s lost her, he drops onto an overturned apple crate behind a butcher’s shop and plants his elbows on his knees, his face buried in his hands. 

“I remember you.” 

Kieran starts, his shoulder blade colliding with the brick wall. When he spins to face her, he finds that she’s filled out some since he last saw her, all smooth curves where there used to be sharp angles. Her lips are pursed into an accusatory pout.

“Someone ought to put a bell on you,” he says. 

“I remember you,” she repeats. Her striking eyes narrow onto his face. “You’re the boy from the park.” 

Kieran blows a gusty sigh through his cheeks. “You shouldn’t have followed me.” 

Lauren crosses her arms over her chest. She looks thirteen, maybe fourteen. The last time he saw her, she had a gap between her teeth and butterfly clips in her hair. He can tell that the past five years have sharpened her, left her a little more suspicious. “Are you in a cult, or something?”

Kieran huffs an incredulous laugh. “What?”

She shrugs, flicking her gaze to the mouth of the alley, then back to him. “It would explain why you keep running away from me.” Hurt briefly flickers across her expression before melting back into impassivity.

He spends a moment mulling over her accusation and then realizes that she’s not _entirely_ wrong, in theory. “I’m not in a cult,” he replies at length. “I wouldn’t look good with a shaved head, anyway.”

Lauren tilts her head, unsmiling. “Your hair is still long.” 

“Sort of suits me, don’t you think?” 

She chews the inside of her cheek, unwilling to feed his ego. “And you still look dirty.”

“Some might call it rugged.”

“And thin.” 

“Have to work off all of those candy bars somehow.” 

Lauren’s eyes narrow at that, her expression clouded with the memory that’s tethered them all these years. She shifts her weight between her feet. He can practically see the cogs turning in her head. “Are you homeless?” 

“No.” The shelter the Phantom Scythe provides is just that — shelter, in the most literal sense of the word. A roof over his head and, when he’s lucky, a sleeping bag under him, which is far preferable to the concrete floor. 

“You’re not lying,” she mumbles. “But you’re not telling the whole truth.”

A dark brow edges into Kieran’s hairline. “How do you know that?”

“I just do,” Lauren replies vaguely. “Can I see you tomorrow?”

Kieran sighs. “I-”

“Let me rephrase,” she interjects. “I’m going to see you tomorrow. Same place. Four o’clock. There’s something I want to give you.”

He pulls a heavy hand over his face and peeks at her through the gaps in his fingers. “You’re pretty damned stubborn.” 

Her lips twitch into a tentative grin. “I’ve been told.”

True to her word, she arrives punctually and bearing some sort of gift wrapped in brown parchment paper. When she presses the parcel into his hands, the smell of cooked meat is so overwhelmingly tempting he feels nearly breathless. He can’t recall the last time he’d eaten a proper meal. 

“Jesus, Lauren,” he mutters, glancing around for witnesses. “You really shouldn’t have done this.”

“My uncle’s cook always makes too much food. It would have gone to waste.”

His _cook._ The rift between their lives has never felt so cavernous. “Thank you,” he mutters. He slips the package into a seam he’d cut into the lining of his threadbare jacket. 

She reaches into her own pocket and pulls out a pair of gloves. “These, too.”

Kieran’s fingers close around the gloves as gently as though they were made from snowfall. Her hand brushes his, soft and warm against his own. 

That winter ends up being the coldest in Ardhalis’s recent history. He thinks of her every time he puts them on.   
  


* * *

He’s seventeen when he realizes he wants her.

He’s walking through the town square at Christmas and sees a couple dancing beneath the string lights, breathless with laughter. He wonders what it might feel like to twirl her, to press his lips to her wind bitten cheeks. 

That night, he tries to draw her face from memory, but he can’t quite capture the quirk of her wiry mouth, the way her lips bend just so at the edges, as though she knows something you don’t. 

He tears it up and feels stupid for even trying. 

* * *

  
The next time, he’s nineteen and drunk off his ass. 

He doesn’t particularly care for the feeling. He’d lost a round of poker at the Grim Goblin and someone had shoved a beer stein into his hand and the rest was all a reckless blur. Just as when he had seen her three years prior, he spots her and finds himself unable to look away. 

She’s with the boy he had seen before, and, this time, another girl. The unfamiliar girl skips ahead of them, her dark head bobbing with a restless sort of kinetic energy, her arms splayed wide at her sides. Lauren’s tinkling laughter lingers in the breeze like a dewdrop, and the feeling the sound elicits in Kieran’s chest is so poignant that he stops dead in his tracks and spends a moment staring after her. 

He doesn’t expect her to turn around and catch his gaze. They keep meeting. Meeting and meeting and meeting. He wonders where it’s supposed to stop. 

She says something to her friends and then jogs back towards him, her red hair bobbing out of her scarf. This time, Kieran doesn’t run. He keeps his feet planted in the shadow of the tailor’s shop. 

“We keep doing this,” she huffs. Her breath curls wispy tendrils into the night. 

Kieran shoves his hands into his pockets and tilts his chin in the direction of the blonde boy. “Is he your boyfriend?” 

He’s not sure why he asks. He supposes that the alcohol has loosened his lips enough that it seems like a sensible question. 

Lauren turns, glancing after her friends, her slender face pinched with frustration. “Why would it matter to you?” She snaps. 

It shouldn’t. It’s not his business. “I don’t know,” Kieran answers. “No, that isn’t true. I asked because I want you and I can’t have you, and the thought of you with someone else makes me crazy.” 

Shock registers in her expression, as stark as though she’d been doused with cold water. Her mouth pops open and then snaps shut. “You’re drunk,” she says dryly. 

“I still have those gloves,” he blurts. “They’re the only gift anyone’s ever given me.”

Lauren frowns, shuffling her feet restlessly. She’s wearing those lace-up boots with the pointy heels, the same ones she’d worn the last time they’d met. “You disappeared again,” she says. “I went back to that spot the next day and you never showed.” 

He wishes he could tell her the truth — that they had found out he’d been given food and whipped him for fraternizing with a citizen. But he can’t, so he turns his face up towards the moon and blows a long sigh through his teeth. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know what to think,” she says, tossing her hands up in exasperation. “I mean, _God,_ Kieran. What are we even doing? I don’t even know anything about you-”

“You know me,” he says quietly. “Better than you think.” 

She falls quiet, her eyes tracing a slow, inquisitive path over his face. She knows this. It feels as though their sadness is something physical, like the force of a rip current. Perhaps they’ve never stopped spinning. 

“You’re drunk,” she says, softer this time. 

He doesn’t notice they’ve drawn closer until they’re toe to toe, close enough that the sharp line of her nose nearly brushes his cheek. He tucks the loose strands of hair back into her scarf carefully. 

“Not that drunk.” 

His hands cup her face, the pads of his thumbs tracing a slow circuit along the delicate slant of her jaw. She looks as pale and insubstantial as moonlight, a shimmering vision. Holding her feels like trying to trap water in his palms. 

“Lauren,” he murmurs. 

Her eyes flutter, as though toeing the line between sleep and wakefulness. And then, as though remembering herself, she takes an unsteady step back, her boots nearly catching on the gaps in the cobblestone. His hand darts out to steady her and she shrugs him off with a breathless huff. 

“I have to go. My friends are waiting.” 

His mouth sours. “Right.” 

“I…” Her eyes flick over him restlessly, as though unsure where to settle. 

She turns on her heel and leaves.

* * *

He’s twenty one and unforgivable.

He’s walking home with blood underneath his fingernails and dusky, pre-dawn light on the horizon line. And that’s when he finds her dressed in crisp blues, her Ardhalis Police Department badge winking against the sunrise.

“You’re a police officer,” he says. 

She spins, breathless. After a beat, her lips melt into a tentative approximation of a grin. “Someone ought to put a bell on you.” 

They fall quiet. 

In twenty minutes, Georgia Grisham’s maid will knock on her bedroom door with her breakfast. She’ll find her mistress splayed out and lifeless, a singular puncture wound leaking sticky crimson all over her starchy bedsheets. And when that happens, Lauren will be the one to answer the call. She’ll rush across town and scan her apartment for evidence that doesn’t exist, save only for a single hyacinth. 

Kieran blinks, shifting his focus to the pavement. Looking at her feels like dying. 

“Uh, yeah. I just graduated from the academy.” 

Kieran brings his palm up to the back of his neck. “You’re going to do great,” he murmurs. He should have guessed sooner. He should have known from the moment he met her, the girl with the contraband candy bar and the penchant for pretending she wasn’t sad. 

“Thank you.” 

The conversation stutters to its natural conclusion. She glances at the precinct, then back to him. “My shift starts soon. I should go.” 

“Yeah. Sure.” He takes a step back, watching her with his hands pressed into his pockets. His hands always feel hot and restless around her, marionettes tethered to someone else’s thread. She’s looking at him with a memory in her eyes and he’s never wanted her so much.

Lauren turns away and then hesitates, glancing at him over her shoulder, her lower lip trembling. “Who are you?” She whispers. He looks at her, her face bald with anguish, and he knows, then, that she wants him, too. “Who are you really, Kieran?” 

And so he tells her the truth. The simple kind. 

“No one you should know.” 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry. 
> 
> I was telling Owsey (Hi Owsey, I love you) that I really enjoy writing Lauki because it's so evident that they're so completely, cosmically fated towards one another. I love to think about all of the different timelines in which they might have crossed paths -- as is probably evident in the number of (unfinished, cough) AU longfics and one-shots I've pursued with these two as the focal point. 
> 
> I am still holding out for their HEA, but this little set of vignettes whisked me away and wouldn't let go until I saw it through. 
> 
> Happy Halloween! Love you all.
> 
> -Rabbit


End file.
